Caring Is Creepy by David Zimmerman Read Free Book Online

I told him I was fifteen, even though Dani told me I should lie and tell him I was eighteen, and he didn’t seem to care all that much. He wrote age was unimportant if two people got along.
    “Very true,” Dani said. “If it wasn’t for his blond hair, I’d think he might be my type.”
    Dani pressed me to ask more questions, and to do it faster. She’d had trouble with the computer that afternoon and been forced to call Wynn and ask him to come over and fix it, and now she was afraid it could go out again at any moment. But I didn’t want to rush. I liked the rhythm of how we were talking. Almost right from the start, all of it was romantic. Not romantic as in, I-can’t-wait-to-hold-you-in-my-arms kind of talk. It just seemed like everything we discussed always came back around to relationships. An exchange would begin with him talking about his car and how old and crappy it was (Dani was already planning for him to come get us and take us out on the town in Savannah, so one of the first things she had me ask him was if he had a car), and then a couple of messages later he explained how he got his first real kiss in that very car back when it was still his dad’s. Dani wanted me to ask himif he used his tongue the first time, but I wouldn’t do it. “I bet you he didn’t,” she kept saying.
    When I asked him why he joined the Army, he said it was because he’d been so mad about the towers getting blown up, but then a little later he admitted it was also because he wanted to go to college and didn’t have the tuition money. The Army promised to help pay his way. Later, Logan told me he always said that bit about the towers when he first met someone because it sounded better. The more he told me about his reasons for signing up, the more complicated they got. A lot of it seemed to have to do with his father and his hero brother. Logan said he’d already been on one tour in Iraq, and almost as soon as he got home, the Army told him he’d have to go back for a second one.
    “So, he’s a war hero, too,” was Dani’s reaction.
    We only got to exchange messages for about twenty minutes because he was using someone else’s laptop and they kicked him off to play a video game where you were a giant ant and you had to herd aphids, or some such, but before he said good-bye, he gave us his cell phone number.
    “I can already see us drinking frozen daiquiris down on River Street,” Dani said. “This is beautiful.”
    Dani was all set for me to call him right away—she had visions of daiquiris dancing in her head—but I reminded her of one of her own rules.
Always wait three days to call
.

Crazy Spell
    O n the day after I learned L.L. meant Logan Loy, it got up to one hundred and two degrees by lunchtime. This always meant more accident victims over at the hospital. According to Dr. Drose, people had a tendency to go loony with the heat because it broiled their brains. During the winter, a tense situation might stay tense—say, for example, an out-of-work husband cooped up at night with his overworked wife—but during a hot summer spell, this same situation would pop—the pop in this case coming from the same husband’s fist making contact with his wife’s nose, or from the skillet of a work-frazzled wife on the husband’s skull. What it meant in my day-to-day life was that there were twice as many patients to attend to and Mom hardly ever came home, and when she did she’d be in some weird zone like she was now, sitting in front of the TV and spooning nacho cheese dip straight out of the jar while drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette—all at the same time. I’m not kidding. I saw her take a drag while she chewed.
    “Lynn, honey,” she said, as I opened the refrigerator. Her voice had a tight sound to it. I thought she might of noticed the missing beer.
    “Yeah?”
    “If Hayes comes by—” She jabbed out her half-smoked cigarette and gulped down the rest of her